10 Jul The Banting diet phenomenon in SA
There’s a joke doing the rounds in Cape Town, where the so-called “Tim Noakes diet” has taken off: you can’t find cauliflower or double cream yoghurt for love or money. The humble flower head is fast replacing starches such as rice, pasta and potatoes on the plate, leaving supermarkets struggling to meet demand. And full cream dairy is back in vogue. The Banting diet is currently huge news in South Africa, and here the Financial Mail weighs it up….
The low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet (LCHF) that the sports science professor has been advocating for three years goes against decades of received wisdom, and even his own pro-carb position laid out in The Lore of Running. If you own the book, he joked following his about-turn, tear out the nutrition section. Explaining his switch, Noakes says he realised in 2010, in spite of being a lifelong athlete, that he was overweight and felt sluggish running. Then he stumbled on a book which he thought made unrealistic weight loss claims using a low-carb eating plan. He dismissed it as junk, until he recognised the names of three scientists behind the research.
He tracked the science behind their book, The New Atkins for a New You. “Within an hour I was exposed to 150 research studies of low-carbohydrate diets that I had no idea existed,” he says. “The work was published in reputable journals. I decided I was going to cut the carbs. Within days I began to notice the benefits. Within eight weeks I had lost 11kg and improved my running times to those I had last run 20 years earlier.”
Physical symptoms he believed were due to ageing, he says, were in fact caused by the poor food choices he had been making during those years.
Noakes found himself at the centre of a storm of criticism about the veracity of the science, and questions about the anecdotal and personal basis for his claims. But the foundation of this nutritional position appears to be part of a broader global shift in the decades-old consensus that fat, including saturated fat mostly from animal products, is at the root of heart disease. Because of that, we’ve been told since the 1970s to eat a prudent diet that is high in carbs, low in fat.
But Time magazine’s recent cover feature calls for a return to butter, citing a shifting scientific consensus that sugar and processed foods are at the root of the weight and related health problems previously blamed on fat.
The latest publication to blow what Harvard University now calls “the low-fat myth” out the water is Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise. The investigative journalist spent nine years tracking the source of the original claim that fats are linked with heart disease and that a high-carbohydrate diet is the healthiest option.
She unearths what she says are “overzealous researchers, [who] through a combination of ego, bias and premature institutional consensus have allowed dangerous misrepresentations to become dietary dogma”. She shows a scientific basis for why even saturated fats have a place in our diets, bringing back meat, butter, full-cream dairy and eggs…..